facts were just reversed by him. Shakspeare, not Sidney, was the borrower. He has adopted plea after plea and argument after argument in favour of marriage, and taken the greater part of his subject matter for the first 12 or 13 Sonnets from Sidney's Arcadia. In Book iii. pp. 431, 432, of that work, will be found these arguments on behalf of marriage and children "No, no, my dear niece (said Cecropia), Nature, when you were first born, vowed you a woman, and as she made you child of a mother, so to do your best to be mother of a child. She gave you beauty to move love; she gave you wit to know love; she gave you an excellent body to reward love; which kind of liberal rewarding is crowned with an unspeakable felicity. For this, as it bindeth the receiver, so it makes happy the bestower. This doth not impoverish, but enrich the giver. O the comfort of comforts, to see your children grow up, in whom you are, as it were, eternised! If you could conceive what a heart-tickling joy it is to see your own little ones, with awful love come running to your lap, and like little models of yourself still carry you about them, you would think unkindness in your own thoughts, that ever they did rebel against the measure to it. Perchance I set this blessedness before your eyes, as captains do victory before their soldiers, to which they must come thro' many pains, griefs, and dangers? No, I am content you shrink from this my counsel, if the way to come unto it be not most of all pleasant." "I know not (answered the sweet Philoclea) what contentment you speak of, but I am sure the best you can make of it (which is marriage) is a burdenous yoke." "Ah, dear niece (said Cecropia), how much you are deceived. A yoke, indeed, we all bear, laid upon us in creation, which by marriage is not increased, but thus far eased that you have a yoke-fellow to help draw through the cloddy cumbers of this world. O widow-nights, bear witness with me of the difference! How often alas, do I embrace the orphan side of my bed, which was wont to be imprinted by the body of my dear husband! Believe me, niece, man's experience is woman's best eye-sight. Have you ever seen a pure rose-water kept in a crystal glass? How fine it looks! how sweet it smells while the beautiful glass imprisons it! Break the prison, and let the water take his own course, doth it not embrace the dust, and lose all his former sweetness and fairness? Truly so are we, if we have not the stay rather than the restraint of crystalline marriage. My heart melts to think of the sweet comfort I, in that happy time, received, when I had never cause to care but the care was doubled; when I never rejoiced, but that I saw my joy shine in another's eyes. And is a solitary life as good as this? Then, can one string make as good music as a consort? Then, can one colour set forth a beauty?" This passage contains most of the Texts for the first 13 Sonnets. Take the last one first; "Can one string make as good music as a consort?" (concert) and see how it is expanded in Sonnet 8, where the concert or harmony of parts is pourtrayed. Look next at the imagery of distillation applied in Sonnets 5 and 6; here in the lines italicized are the suggestions of the "liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass," Sonnet 5, and the following out of the illustration in the next Sonnet, "Make sweet some vial;" the suggestion of Sonnet 6 Which happies those that pay the willing loan. Also of the children- -same Sonnet-which are to "eternise," so that death shall leave him "living in posterity;" the argument of the "single string" in Sonnet 8, reversely applied; the image of the widow with her children, who keep her husband's form in mind, Sonnet 9; the plea, "O change thy thought,' because it is unkindly, Sonnet 10; the argument of Sonnet 11,— Which bounteous gift thou should'st in bounty cherish. When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.-Sonnet 13. The suggestion of Sonnet 13 Dear, my Love, you know You had a Father: let your son say so! All these are in that brief passage of Sidney's prose, and all are used for the same purpose, the main difference being that in the Arcadia it is a woman speaking to a woman. Various other illustrations might be cited, to show that Shakspeare has literally adopted sentiment, idea, and image, one after the other, from the Arcadia. Let me draw out a brief parallel of likenesses in accordance with the order of the Sonnets. The following passages are selected from 'Geron and Histor' (Arcadia 71) as a further specimen of Sidney's argument in verse— "In faith, good Histor, long is your delay Than is the quiet joy of loving wife, Which whoso wants, half of himself doth miss. Nature above all things requireth this, Which drawn-out line doth hold all human bliss: In granting unto him a grandsire's name. O Histor, seek within thyself to flourish; Thy House by thee must live, or else be gone, The matter of Shakspeare's first 13 Sonnets then is mainly adapted from Sidney's Arcadia, which was published in 1590. But the most fully-developed faculty of comparison can detect nothing in the first 13 Sonnets that could have been derived from Sidney's Sonnets in his Astrophel and Stella,' which was NOT published until 1591. This very striking fact tends to warrant the inference that these 13 Sonnets, at least, were written immediately after Shakspeare had read the Arcadia in 1590, and before he had seen the Astrophel and Stella of 1591. Because with Sonnet 14 the likeness to or borrowing from the later work begins. For example, Sidney writes "Though dusty Wits dare scorn Astrology, And Fools can think those lamps of purest light- To have for no cause birthright in the sky And know great Causes great effects procure; By only those two stars in Stella's face." (26, Grosart's Ed.) Now the writing of a Sonnet properly consists in the perfect evolution of one thought. In that sense this is a perfect Sonnet, as so many of Sidney's are. The subject is Astrology, an earlier form of Astronomy. The writer is a believer in astrology; he prognosticates the future by means of its science. Not by the stars in heaven though, but by the heaven of those two stars in Stella's face. Now see how Shakspeare takes the one thought and turns it to his own account, on the line of his one thought running through many Sonnets, viz. that of getting his friend to marry "Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck, But not to tell of good or evil luck, Of plagues, of deaths, or Seasons' quality : As truth and beauty shall together thrive, If from thyself to store thou would'st convert ; Or else of thee this I prognosticate Thy end is Truth's and Beauty's doom and date." After this there is considerable derivation at times, but no such wholesale adoption of argument as there was from the Arcadia. This is from one of Sidney's songs— My reader probably knows how often that strain is echoed in Shakspeare's Sonnets. 1 66 Astronomy." This exchange is curious. Astrology was the correct term, but this belonged to the later science. In his wretched outcast state Sidney describes his forlorn condition as that of a bankrupt. He says "With what sharp checks I in myself am shent And by just counts myself a bankrupt know Which unto it by birthright I do owe; And which is worse no good excuse can show, But that my wealth I have most idly spent! My youth doth waste, my knowledge brings forth toys ; I see my course to lose myself doth bend; In the next Sonnet Sidney writes— and in Sonnet 64 "When most I glory, then I feel most shame," "Let Fortune lay on me her worst disgrace, Let folk o'ercharged with brain against me cry." This position of the bankrupt is similar, and the same thoughts are amplified, the expression being intensified, in Shakspeare's 29th and 30th Sonnets, in which the speaker bemoans his bankrupt condition, his outcast state, the waste of his previous time. In the one case the speaker is self-summoned to the audit and reckoning of Reason. In the other the speaker says— "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past.' Sidney writes of Stella (1st Song) as she "who long-dead beauty with increase reneweth." The speaker of Sonnet 31 says "Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts Which I, by lacking, have supposed dead; And there reigns love and all love's loving parts, And all those friends that I thought buried."-Sonnet 31. In his absence from Stella Sidney writes, Sonnets 88, 89 "Out, traitor Absence, darest thou counsel me From my dear Captainess to run away." "Tush, Absence; while thy mists eclipse that light, My orphan sense flies to the inward sight." (Cf. Shakspeare, Sonnet 61.) NIGHT AND DAY. "Now that of absence the most irksome night |